After months of delays, a federal judge on Monday sentenced a once prominent Butler County politician to prison. U.S. District Court Judge Sandra Beckwith imposed a penalty of four years behind bars on Mike Fox, an ex-Butler County commissioner and former state representative. Fox's attorneys had tried to argue he should get home incarceration because he is morbidly obese and suffers from diabetes and depression, but Beckwith wasn't swayed. Fox agreed to a plea deal in early 2011 on charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and filing a false tax return.

In another sign that higher education and collegiate sports are becoming Big Business, Miami University in Oxford has trademarked the nickname, “Cradle of Coaches.” The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved the request last month, capping a two-year effort by school attorneys. The university has used the phrase since 1959.

Gov. John Kasich is expected to announce a plan Wednesday in which he will keep a campaign pledge to cut Ohio's income tax rate by filling the budget hole it will cause by by raising taxes on oil and gas companies involved with fracking.

A bus driver who drove into a local TV news van in January was found guilty Monday of making an improper lane change and was ordered to pay a $100 fine. Joann Searles, 48, was the driver of a GoBus that clipped the WCPO-TV (Channel 9) van during live coverage of a news conference on the Horseshoe Casino collapse on Jan. 27, just outside the construction site of the new casino on Gilbert Avenue, at the Greyhound Bus Terminal. Searles already has lost her job because of the incident. Here's an idea: Don't hold a press conference at a busy bus terminal or park your van in the middle of a driveway. Casino officials should give this lady a job.

City planners are seeking public input from residents about how Cincinnati should grow and be developed during the next 30 years. The city's Department of Community Planning and Buildings is drafting Cincinnati's first comprehensive plan since 1980 and will hold an open house Wednesday. It will be held from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on the seventh floor of Two Centennial Plaza, 805 Central Ave., downtown.

In news elsewhere, a federal investigation has concluded that managers at major banks ignored widespread errors in the foreclosure process, in some cases instructing employees to adopt make-believe titles and speed documents through the system despite internal objections. The probe by the Department of Housing and Urban Development said managers were aware of the problems but did nothing to correct them. Some of the banks involved include Bank Of America and Wells Fargo.

Some critics of President Obama are saying he's being given a pass on policies that would have triggered outrage if they had been done by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The actions include aggressively filling his reelection war chest with Super PAC money and approving shoot-to-kill orders against an American terror suspect overseas. The disconnect reveals a double standard, Politico reports.

A former editor at The Sun newspaper in Britain is among six people arrested by Scotland Yard detectives on suspicion of conspiracy to “pervert the course of justice,” as part of the investigation into telephone hacking by media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch. Rebekah Brooks, 43, was arrested this morning at her home. The arrests form the biggest single swoop yet by police in its ongoing investigation into alleged voicemail interception; so far, 23 people have been held, with two people released without charge.

At least 30 people are feared dead after a ferry collided with a barge in the Meghna River in Bangladesh. About 35 passengers were rescued by another ferry but more than 150 passengers remain unaccounted for, officials said.

A major detergent brand from Procter & Gamble has become the target of thieves nationwide, police said. Theft of Tide detergent has become so rampant that some cities are setting up special task forces to stop it. One thief in Minnesota stole $25,000 worth of the product before he was arrested last year. Tide has become a form of currency on the streets and the retail price is steadily high, making it a popular item on the black market.

A prominent Republican congressman is under investigation for insider trading.U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), who heads the House Financial Services Committee, is being probed by the Office of Congressional Ethics for making suspicious trades and buying certain stock options while helping oversee the nation’s banking and financial services industries.

In an attempt to end the controversy about whether some Cincinnati City Council members might financially benefit from the proposed streetcar project, the city solicitor today sent a letter to the Ohio Ethics Commission asking for a specific opinion about the project.

City Solicitor John Curp sent a four-page letter to the Ethics Commission, along with five pages of diagrams about the streetcar project’s likely route.

Buchanan says 3CDC is covered fairly, despite her ties

The Enquirer’s top boss has
told CityBeat that her connection to a major real estate development group was “overlooked”
in a lengthy, front-page article about the organization that was published
April 15.

Publisher Margaret Buchanan wrote
in response to an email that she didn’t influence the preparation, editing or
placement of an article about the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. (3CDC).
Buchanan sits on 3CDC’s executive committee, and is in charge of overseeing
publicity and marketing efforts for the organization.

The Enquirer published a 1,900
word-plus article about 3CDC, lauding the group for its efforts to redevelop
Over-the-Rhine despite the economic downturn. Buchanan’s role with 3CDC wasn’t
mentioned, but she told CityBeat it has been disclosed in past articles and
will be done again in the future.

Over several years, The
Cincinnati Enquirer has fully covered the pro's and con's (sic) of 3CDC's development
efforts in Over-the-Rhine for our readers and we are very proud of that
coverage.

As publisher, I sit on 3CDC's
executive committee — and did not influence any of the reporting on this issue.
Our editor is completely responsible for all editorial decisions. Typically my
participation on this committee is disclosed, although it was overlooked for
the article that ran on Sunday, April 15. It will continue to be disclosed in
the future.

Margaret Buchanan

A search using the ProQuest
database of The Enquirer’s archives found that the newspaper has published 481
articles and news briefs mentioning 3CDC since the group began its efforts in 2004.
(Given how the database is organized, however, it’s likely that some of the
entries might be duplicative.)

Of the 481 entries, Buchanan
was mentioned in 15 articles. That equates to about 1/32nd of the
articles.

Most of the published
mentions about Buchanan’s ties to 3CDC weren’t in articles about the group’s retail
and residential development projects. Rather, they mostly occurred in articles
about 3CDC’s efforts to move a homeless shelter away from Over-the-Rhine.

Also, one mention was in an
article about the new School for Creative and Performing Arts, while another
occurred in a piece marking the 10th anniversary of the police
shooting death of Timothy Thomas.

This week’s Porkopolis column
mentioned Gannett’s ethics code, which includes such admonishments as “We will
remain free of outside interests, investments or business relationships that
may compromise the credibility of our news report,” and “We will avoid
potential conflicts of interest and eliminate inappropriate influence on
content.”

The code also states “When
unavoidable personal or business interests could compromise the newspaper’s
credibility, such potential conflicts must be disclosed to one’s superior and,
if relevant, to readers.”

In her email, Buchanan didn’t
address why these rules don’t apply to her connection to 3CDC.

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

• Monday’s Enquirer carries a sanitized obit for Larry Beaupre, the fine, aggressive Enquirer editor whose career was destroyed by a trusted reporter during the Chiquita scandal.

Larry’s
genius was motivating his staff to take chances and go the extra step.
No one wanted to admit not making the last phone call to check something
in a story. We made those calls.

As part of that, Larry brought the “woodshed” to the Enquirer
newsroom on Elm Street. It was the perfect walk to his corner office
overlooking the Ohio and Licking Rivers. There, Larry would privately
discuss some failing or pratfall in that morning’s paper.

My
favorite Larry story — there is no way I’ll call him Beaupre — is
Lucasville. I was involved in coverage of that prison riot and
occupation from its start on Easter, 1993. Larry was part of
Pulitzer-winning coverage of the bloody Attica prison revolt in New
York. He gave us everything we asked for at Lucasville. In the middle of
that deadly mess — 24/7 for 11 days in Scioto County red clay mud
outside the prison on what became press row — he drove down to deliver
Sunday papers and thank his bleary staff. That’s leadership.

“I
will never forget the Sunday morning when Beaupre showed up,”
then-reporter Howard Wilkinson recalled for an earlier column. “He asked
me what we needed. ‘Cash, and lots of it,’ I said, explaining that we
had to buy food and clothing for the crew, most of whom came unprepared
for 11 days in the mud. Larry pulled his wallet out of his back pocket
and start counting out a wad of $50s . . . gave me $500 on the spot,
which I ended up spending at Big Bear and the Subway in Lucasville.
‘There’s more where that came from,’ Beaupre said.”

Larry didn’t
meddle when things went right. There always were questions about why we
didn’t have some Lucasville story that someone else did. Larry always
accepted “we checked it out and it’s not true.” We got it right and he
honored that.

A year later, he made sure we knew that a
routine Lucasville anniversary story wasn’t acceptable. Kristen DelGuzzi
and I spent weeks on race, religion and crowding in prisons around the
country and Lucasville. The ordinary was not acceptable to Larry or his
editors.

Not long ago, I sent Howard Wilkinson’s comment to
Larry, along with that column anticipating the 20th anniversary of
Lucasville in 2013. Larry responded warmly, saying it’s nice to be
remembered for something beyond Chiquita.

However, it’s the
nature of our trade that we’re remembered for our biggest screwups. Ask
Dan Rather. So it is with Larry: the year-long investigative effort and
special 18-page section describing what reporters Mike Gallagher and Cam
McWhirter learned about Chiquita operations here and abroad. Typically,
Larry gave two trusted reporters all of the resources they needed. He
and Gallagher had worked together before Larry brought him to
Cincinnati. Gallagher’s decision to eavesdrop on Chiquita voice mails
doomed the project and cost Larry his career.

They gave us a
dark view of Chiquita operations, especially in Central America. The
project blew up in our faces and Larry was the scapegoat even though the
stories had gone all of the way up the corporate chain and back again.

Readers
noted that despite the three page 1 apologies and curious renunciation
of the stories that followed revelation of Gallagher’s dishonest
reporting methods, the Enquirer did not retract the facts.

Larry and the Enquirer
had challenged the most powerful man in Cincinnati, Carl Lindner.
Gallagher’s dishonesty gave Lindner his opening and Lindner crippled the
paper for years. As part of the deal with Lindner and Chiquita, the
paper paid $14 million.

More devastating was the condition that
Larry had to go. He did. McWhirter was moved to a top reporting job at
the Gannett paper in Detroit. David Wells was removed as local editor —
the one job he always wanted at the Enquirer - but stayed to become opinion page editor.

Gallagher
— who lied to everyone about how he got those voice mails and included
his lies in the published stories — was fired. He stayed around to plead
guilty to tapping Chiquita voice mail system and stayed out of prison
by naming his Chiquita-related sources.

The Enquirer
lost the passion and editing talents of Larry and David Wells and Cam
McWhirter’s reporting skills. Other colleagues began leaving; the Enquirer was tainted goods. Job applications from similarly talented journalists dried up, I’m told, for years. I’m not sure the Enquirer ever recovered.

•
Larry (above) and his family moved to Mt. Lookout from West Chester
when he came from New York. No matter what landscapers planted in his
garden overlooking Ault Park, deer ate them. Then there were the
raccoons. Larry came to my desk in distress, wondering what he could do.
I suggested a nonlethal Havahart trap. Let the critter loose in another
park. Larry tried it. Bait would be gone, the trapdoors closed and no
‘coon. One night he stayed up to see what was going on. The critter went
in, ate the bait, and when the doors dropped, other raccoons tipped
over the trap. Doors opened and “prisoner” walked free. I think he gave
up; Midwestern deer and raccoons were more than his New York smarts
could conquer.

• If you missed it, go back to last Tuesday’s Enquirer
opinion page and read mediator Bob Rack’s essay on civility in public
life. It’s broader than elections and is more practical than the typical
admonishment to behave.

• Thursday’s Enquirer
started a page 1 watch on the Pride of the Tristate, naysaying
obstructionists Mitch and John. I hope Enquirer reporters tell us what
Mitch and John and their House and Senate colleagues do in the name of
“bipartisanship.” Skip their words. Watch what they do.

•
“Gravitas” apparently is so 2010. The new word favored by many politics
writers is “meme.” A wise editor once told me to avoid foreign words
unless they’re so common that even an editor would know them. Meme —
from the Greek — fails.

• Quotationspage.com attributes this
famous aphorism to department store merchant John Wanamaker: “Half the
money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know
which half.” I wonder if that’s true about campaign ads. Billionaire
right-winger Sheldon Abelson helped poison the well but the New York Times
says only his candidates drank; they all lost. I haven’t seen a similar
analysis of libertarian Koch brothers spending but it reportedly was
far greater than even Abelson’s. Democrats countered by raising and
spending zillions. The only difference was the far greater number of
Democratic donors needed to reach the magic totals. Great for TV
stations but brain damaging for the rest of us.

• There
is no “financial cliff.” We’re not going to go over it on Jan. 1. An end
to Bush tax cuts won’t pitch us in a recession on Jan. 2.
Sequestration won’t suck zillions out of the economy in one day. Yes,
there is a downward economic slope if Congress and Obama don’t sort out
the tax/deficit mess. So, why do journalists continue to parrot
bipartisan “over the cliff” rhetoric when the facts they report make it
clear that no such precipice exists?

• My nomination for a “Useless” award is the New York Times telephone people who are supposed to help with home delivery problems. Twice last week, the Times
wasn’t there in the morning and replacement papers weren’t delivered
that day or the next. That included Wednesday’s paper with the election
results. More aggravating was the blue-wrapped Times on my neighbor’s drive, giving lie to the Times’ “problem resolution” staff’s explanation that there were problems at the printing plant. Times’ operators and clueless supervisors were in Iowa: dim bulbs who sounded like they read from an all-purposes script.

• I finally used the New York Times website to email their vp/circulation. A reply came quickly, promising to contact the Enquirer whose carriers deliver the Times. A prompt call from Enquirer
circulation on Elm Street promised replacement papers and a personal
delivery. Didn’t happen. Still hasn’t, a week later. A perfect union of
ignorance and interstate bullshit.

• Last week’s CityBeat
cover story was the annual Project Censored; the most underreported
major stories in the major news media. The list misses my No. 1 most
underreported story of the year: third-party candidates for the
presidency and their platforms.

About the only time the major
news media noted Third Party existence was to wonder if a third party
might get enough votes to deny victory to a Democrat or Republican in
any state(s). Affecting a state’s vote totals would be bad for
democracy, those news media anxieties imply.

So I’d offer two
suggestions to my 24/7 news media colleagues. First, voting one’s
principles is not bad for democracy and it has the potential for great
news stories. Second, third party platforms suggest ingredients in
whatever becomes conventional wisdom in 2016 or 2020.

That’s
what third parties do; hopeful but realistic, they do the thinking that
seems to escape mainstream Democrats and Republicans. If you doubt me,
look at what came out of the Progressive era 100 years ago and what
might come out of Tea Party initiative and energy.

• Are news
media short of photos of Petraeus in civvies? He’s no longer a general.
Most images I saw after his surprise resignation had him in uniform.
Also, the developing story of how his affair was discovered is
fascinating. The FBI stumbled on Petraeus when it was investigating a
complaint of online harassment against Paula Broadwell, the adoring
graduate student who became author of the new Petraeus biography and his
lover. The complaint came from another woman, a frightened friend of
the Petraeus family. Agents looking at Broadwell’s emails found
classified information and romantic emails between Petraeus and
Broadwell. Tacky as this is, it fell to Jay Leno to sum it up: Guys,
Leno said, if the head of the CIA can’t keep an affair secret, don’t
you try it because if you do, “You’re screwed.”

• BBC’s sex
scandal — knighted entertainer Jimmy Savile and others at BBC abused
hundreds of girls for years — continues to spread. So far, it hasn’t
touched the BBC World Service which Americans get on WVXU/WMUB and other
FM stations.

Last week, however, it cost BBC’s new top exec his
job. He quit after one of his reporters suggested during a TV interview
that he should “go” and a former Cabinet minister responsible for BBC
said Winnie the Pooh would have been a more effective curb on careless,
defamatory reporting.

The latest mess involves BBC’s top
domestic current affairs/investigative TV program, Newsnight and the
broader issue of child abuse by prominent and powerful figures in
British public life.

BBC’s Newsnight broadcast Steve Messham’s
claim that a top Conservative politician was among men who molested him
in a state children’s home during the 1980s. Newsnight didn’t name the
Tory but others did on social media: Lord Alistair McAlpine. He came
forward last week and denied wrongdoing.

When Messham saw a
photo of McAlpine after the broadcast, Messham recanted and apologized.
His abuser wasn’t McAlpine. No one showed Messham a photo of McAlpine
before broadcasting his accusation. BBC last week apologized
“unreservedly.” That phrase usually means a libel suit is anticipated.

Meanwhile,
BBC officials canceled Newsnight investigations. Newsnight already is
under investigation for killing an program that would have outed Savile
as a serial abuser. Savile is dead but three colleagues have been
arrested so far.

• Thedailybeast.com excerpts from Into the Fire,
a book by Dakota Meyer, the Kentuckian who won the Medal of Honor in
Afghanistan. It’s a toy chest of news tips for reporters. Here’s part of
the excerpt:

When I got home in December, I felt like I had
landed on the moon. Kentucky is pretty much what you think: cheerful
bluegrass music like Bill Monroe, rolling countryside, good moonshine,
great bourbon and pretty girls. Greenery, lakes, the creeks and rolling
hills, forests, birds, other critters and all the farms. There’s that
genuine friendliness that comes with small towns and close-knit
families. You don’t want to act like an asshole because it will get back
to your grandmother by supper.

“Something like: ‘Well, Dakota, I hear you had some words today with that neighbor of Ellen’s sister’s boy.’

“Dad,
of course, was happy to see me, as were my grandparents, so that was a
good feeling. Dad didn’t give me a hard time about Ganjigal, and neither
did my leatherneck Grandpa. We just didn’t talk much about it. It was
great seeing my family and friends, but they had their own lives.
Everyone around me was excited about football, Christmas, and other
normal things; I was looking at the clapboard houses and the cars and
thinking, man — so flimsy. They wouldn’t give cover worth shit in a
firefight.

“It was an exposed feeling. And where were my machine
guns? I found my old pistol and kept it around like a rabbit’s foot, but
I missed my 240s and my .50-cals something awful. It seems weird, I’m
sure, but I really just wasn’t buying it that there wasn’t some enemy
about to come over the green hills, and I felt so unprepared—I wouldn’t
be any good to protect anybody.

“I was set to soon go off to Fort Thomas, Kentucky, for PTSD therapy . . . “

•
Next year, we’ll commemorate the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. It
wasn’t the last time we underestimated the resilience of a far weaker
“enemy.” JFK reportedly told the Times that he would have aborted the invasion if the Times
had had the cajones to publish what it knew about preparations in
Florida and Central America. However, during the two weeks before the
invasion, the Times published stories about the preparations.

•
Next year, we’ll also commemorate JFK’s murder. I watched demonstrators
at our London Grosvenor Square Embassy vilify the U.S. for its role in
the Cuban missile crisis. The night of JFK’s death, crowds were back . .
. to sign a book of condolences.

• A federal judge ordered
the FBI to pay journalist Seth Rosenfeld $479,459 for court costs and
lawyers’ fees. He sued the FBI after it ignored his appropriate requests
under the Freedom of Information Act. Poynter.com says Rosenfeld will
donate the money to the First Amendment Project Project in Oakland,
Calif. It handled his case pro bono for 20 years. That’s chump change to
the bureau and it costs individual agents nothing for blowing him off.
Meanwhile, news organizations say broad resistance to FOIA requests has
worsened throughout the federal government under Obama.

• Newsweek
is going digital-only next year, in keeping with boss Tina Brown’s
changing reading habits. She says she doesn’t even look at newsstands
any longer; everything she wants is on her Kindle. Of course, she’ll
fire people. Newsweek always was No. 2 to Time
Magazine which continues its print edition. I’ve ignored giveaway
offers from both magazines for years. It isn’t print, it’s their
content. My choice? The Economist’s weekly U.S. print edition.

•
ABC said his family was unaware of film director Tony Scott’s brain
cancer when he jumped off a bridge in August and died. Now, ABC admits
its original unverified and uncorroborated story was wrong. There was no
brain cancer. It only took two months to admit and correct the error.

The Enquirer ran a lengthy, glowing article over the weekend about the ongoing redevelopment of Over-the-Rhine and 3CDC's central role in helping it occur — all of which is well and good. But the piece, which contained more than 1,900 words, could only find space for 125 words critical of the effort and none at all for a direct quote from 3CDC's critics. (That's about 1/16th for the those keeping track at home.) Maybe that's because Enquirer Publisher Margaret Buchanan sits on 3CDC's executive committee and is in charge of publicity for the group, which was yet another fact curiously missing from the article.

Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco, Hamilton County's new coroner, attended a screening of the film, Bully, over the weekend. Her appearance was part of an effort to draw attention to bullying and child abuse during Child Abuse Awareness Month. The documentary relates the tales of several students across the United States who have been tormented by their peers. Its distributor, The Weinstein Co., released the film without a rating after the MPAA announced it would give it a “NC-17” rating for coarse language, which would've prohibited anyone under the age of 17 — the movie's primary audience — from seeing it.

Cincinnati Reds superstar Joey Votto hit a two-run double in the 11th inning Sunday, which allowed his team to avoid a four-game sweep by giving it an 8-5 victory over the Washington Nationals.

Some Covington business leaders are upset that a current plan to build a new span to replace the Brent Spence Bridge doesn't include any exits into the city's downtown. As proposed, motorists on southbound Interstate 75 would have to exit the highway about a mile earlier, near Ezzard Charles Drive in Cincinnati, to reach the Northern Kentucky locale.

Just up I-75 a bit, a new report reveals the city of Dayton has the highest office vacancy rate among the nation’s metropolitan areas, and the portion of its office space that is unoccupied is at least at a 13-year high. The struggling Rust Belt city had about 27.3 percent of its office space vacant in the first quarter of this year, according to Reis Inc., a New York-based commercial real estate research group.

President Hamid Karzai linked Sunday's militant attacks to intelligence failures, especially on the part of NATO. In his first response to the attacks, Karzai praised the performance of the Afghan security forces. He gave tribute to the "bravery and sacrifice of the security forces who quickly and timely reacted to contain the terrorists," a French news agency reported.

The trial began today for Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-Islamic militant who allegedly killed 77 people last summer during a shooting rampage in Norway. Breivik, 33, was defiant at the proceedings. Asked by a judge whether he wished to plead guilty, Breivik replied, “I acknowledge the acts but I don’t plead guilty as I claim I was doing it in self-defense.” He has previously said his actions were meant to discourage further Islamic immigration.

As the deadline looms for the filing of federal income tax returns, a new Gallup Poll finds Americans fall into two almost evenly matched camps: those who believe the amount they pay in federal income tax is too high (46 percent) and those who consider it "about right" (47 percent). Just 3 percent consider their taxes too low.

The United States and China have been discreetly engaging in "war games" amid rising anger in Washington over the scale and audacity of Beijing-organized cyber attacks on western governments and Big Business, London's Guardian newspaper has reported. State Department and Pentagon officials, along with their Chinese counterparts, were involved in two war games last year that were designed to help prevent a sudden military escalation between the sides if either felt they were being targeted. Another session is planned for May.

Just a few weeks after leaving office, ex-Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is trying to raise awareness about a political action committee (PAC) she helped create while campaigning last year for the U.S. Senate nomination.

Courage PAC is designed to increase grassroots advocacy and citizen activism on several issues, and perform a watchdog role on Ohio government now that Republicans fill most statewide offices.

The activist branch of a liberal telecommunications company
has filed a petition asking the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate
allegations that Murray Energy forced miners in Beallsville, Ohio to
attend a rally for Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney.

CREDO Action Campaign Manager Josh Nelson told CityBeat that the group emailed the petition with 4,021 signatures to the Department of Labor Wednesday morning.

The petition reads: "Requiring employees to attend a Mitt
Romney political rally without pay is totally unacceptable. I urge you
to conduct a thorough investigation to determine whether Murray Energy
violated any federal laws on August 14th, and to hold it fully
accountable if it did."

Romney appeared at the event to attack what he called
President Barack Obama’s “war on coal.” He was flanked on stage by
hundreds of miners with soot-stained faces.

Dozens of those miners told WWVA-AM West Virginia talk
show host David Blomquist that they were pulled from the mine before
their shift was over and not paid for the full day of work. The miners,
who Blomquist did not identify, said they were told that attendance at
the rally was mandatory.

Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore told
Blomquist on his radio show that managers “communicated to our workforce
that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was
forced to attend.”

He said that people who did not show up to the event,
which organizers say drew 1,500 miners and family members, were not
penalized for their absence.

“Forcing Ohio workers to participate in a political rally
is unacceptable, so we're joining our friends at SEIU in calling on the
U.S. Department of Labor to conduct an investigation to determine
whether or not any federal laws were broken,” Nelson wrote in an email
to CREDO Action’s Ohio activists on Sept. 1.

A spokeswoman for the Labor Department was not immediately
able to confirm whether the department had received the petition or
planned to launch an investigation.

This post will be updated with comment from the Labor Department when it becomes available.

Media musings on Cincinnati and beyond

• Enquirer prices are going
up in a smart way. The paper is embracing a computerized system which
charges frequent users for its digital content. The more individuals
read, the more they’ll be charged. Full access will mean just that and
be available to home delivery and digital subscribers.

However, the Enquirer will
still limit unpaid access to its archives. That’s a cheapening
disservice to readers who want to know more than one day’s or one week’s
reporting.

Infrequent/occasional readers still will be able to read up to 20
articles a month online content without paying. With new ways to get the
news — smart phones, tablets, etc. — the Enquirer
is adapting. As publisher Margaret Buchanan said in a note to readers
and email, it’s better than following some other dailies by cutting
print editions to three-a-week and charging for digital.

For more than a decade, online versions of print content and unique
online content have been free but that’s not a sustainable business
policy. It’s also been trendy to ask why dailies gave away online what
they charged for in print. One response involved the technological
problems involved in charging for digital content. That apparently is
largely resolved here and elsewhere but it’s taken years. Another
response was that of papers including the New York Times:
free online content except for “premium” offerings such as op-ed
columnists. That failed. It irritated more people than it recruited.
Meanwhile, we became accustomed to the journalistic equivalent of a free
lunch.

I say “we” because I quit reading any number of favorite publications
when they threw up pay walls that did not include an occasional freebie.
At the head of the pack were the Wall Street Journal and British
dailies owned by Rupert Murdock. That included the London Times and Sunday Times.
The cost was too great for what I largely could find elsewhere. I still
turn to London’s Financial Times which allows me a few reads a
month. What publishers are learning to their glee is that readers are
willing to pay for much of that now that they can get it on mobile
devices. Surveys indicate that we have an insatiable appetite for news
so long as we can get it anytime, any place we want it. That’s good
news for all of us. Sustainable commercial news media remain vital to
our form of self-government if only because they are everywhere and no
other form of news media can do what they do.

• Maybe some of that new Enquirer
income (above) will allow editor Carolyn Washburn to restore some
traditional assignments that fell victim to years of staff purges. If
anyone needed further proof that firing or retiring specialty beat
reporters exacts a toll on credibility comes in a recent Enquirer
Healthy Living section. The paper turned the entire cover page over to
public relations people promoting their institutions in the guise of
news. At least the Enquirer
doesn’t pretend its reporters wrote those stories; UC Health and OSU got
the bylines. With newsroom staff reductions, it’s open season on
readers for public relations people. They increasingly operate without
the scrutiny and possible intervention of a savvy reporter.

• There is nothing wrong with what UC Health and OSU public relations people do when they offer free content to the Enquirer.
That’s their job; promote the best possible image for their
institutions consistent with the facts. The problem is at the paper.
This goes beyond the traditional back-scratching where reporters rewrite
news releases. That makes it the paper’s product and gives reporters a
chance to ask questions. A lot of what dailies — whether the Enquirer or Wall Street Journal — publish begins with press releases.

This symbiotic relationship can go too far. An Enquirer
journalist once took a junket, came home and put his byline on the
story prepared by the sponsor of the junket. When this
ethical/professional travesty was noted, there was, to the paper’s
shame, little or no condemnation. As one colleague put it, he thought it
was uncommonly well written.

Another time, an Enquirer
journalist put her name on a news release and ran it as a story, then
had the chutzpah to accept an award for that “reporting” from the group
that sent her the original press release.

• The planned Enquirer switch
to smaller, tabloid-like pages has been postponed until 2013; it was to
start this Fall. The paper blames problems with the new format and new
presses at the Columbus Dispatch which is to print both dailies. Meanwhile, Enquirer editor Carolyn Washburn continues to tell us that small is beautiful. Or will be.

• Channel 12 made the right decision in terms of audience numbers when
they switched from the men’s final in the U.S. Open to an hour of
Bengals chatter and then the game. However, viewers got an awful
football game and missed what proved to be a riveting tennis match.

• It’s never too early for Harvard undergrads to learn the importance
of fitting into the Establishment. Reporters of the daily Harvard Crimson, the cradle of untold New York Timesmen over the decades, have agreed to clear quotes with Harvard officials before publishing their stories.

Jimromenesko.com reported this ethical blindness, saying, “Sometimes
nothing is changed. But often, the quotations come back revised, to make
the wording more erudite, the phrasing more direct, or the message more
pointed. Sometimes the quotations are rejected outright or are
rewritten to mean just the opposite of what the administrator said in
the recorded interview.”

Romenesko also quoted Crimson
President (editor) Ben Samuels’ memo to his staff. It said, in part,
“(W)e’ve seen an increase over the past several years in sources,
especially Harvard administrators, who insist on reviewing their quotes
prior to publication. When those administrators read their quotes, even
quotes that Crimson reporters have recorded, they frequently ask that these quotes be modified. “

Some of Harvard’s highest officials — including the president of the
University, the provost, and the deans of the College and of the Faculty
of Arts and Sciences — have agreed to interviews with The Crimson
only on the condition that their quotes not be printed without their
approval. As a result, their quotes have become less candid, less
telling and less meaningful to our coverage . . . To increase our
striving for frank and informative quotations, we add a new policy now.
Effective immediately, no writer may agree to an interview on the terms
that quotes cannot be published without the source’s approval without
express permission of the Managing Editor or the (editor) President.”

• CNN International (CNNi) is too close to repressive governments with which it has business deals, London’s Guardian
says. “CNNi has aggressively pursued a business strategy of extensive,
multifaceted financial arrangements between the network and several of
the most repressive regimes around the world which the network purports
to cover,” the liberal British paper says. “These arrangements extend
far beyond standard sponsorship agreements for advertising of the type
most major media outlets feature. CNNi produces . . . programs in an
arrangement it describes as ‘in association with’ the government of a
country, and offers regimes the ability to pay for specific programs
about their country.” The Guardian
says these programs are then featured as part of CNNi's so-called "Eye
on" series ("Eye on Georgia", "Eye on the Philippines", "Eye on
Poland"), or "Marketplace Middle East", all of which is designed to tout
the positive economic, social and political features of that country.

The Guardian says “the
disclosure for such arrangements is often barely visible . . . To the
average viewer unaware of these government sponsorships, it appears to
be standard ‘reporting’ from the network.” The paper says that in some
“Eye on” programs, no such disclaimer is provided. CNN's "sponsorship
policy" says "'[P]arts of CNN's coverage beyond the daily news are
produced as special reports, which attract sponsors who pay to associate
their products or services with the editorial content,' but claims that
'at no stage do the sponsors have a say in which stories CNN
covers.'"

• Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the Democrats’ convention reminded me
that “enormity” is a poor choice for something big enough to brag
about. If the speaker means huge, he/she should stick to that 5 cent
word and skip the 50 cent malaprop. Enormity describes something awful
or outrageous, not just big or important, as in, the enormity of a
famine or genocide. While they’re at it, speech writers should drop
“fraction” from texts they hand dimmer bosses and clients. A fraction
is anything less than the whole: 99/100 of something is a large
fraction. It’s not a synonym for small.

• Sometimes, NPR reporters have me talking back and it’s not because
it’s a “driveway moment,” when I won’t leave the car until the story is
over. It’s usually because they’ve blown a story, not matter how
balanced or detailed the broadcast. Repeated stories about the Chicago
public school teachers’ strike left me wondering: 26,000 teachers for
350,000 students. I know that’s not really 13+ students per teacher in
each classroom but the numbers still cry for explanation that in its he
said/she said reporting, NPR failed to provide.

• Here’s another approach to saving local journalism: invite the local
daily and public radio station to campus and integrate them with
journalism school. The New York Times
devoted a major business story to this innovation by Mercer University
in Macon, Ga. The story mentioned another innovation, this one in Ohio: TheNewsOutlet initiated by the daily Youngstown Vindicator
and Youngstown State University. Now, it includes Kent State and Akron
universities. Journalism students work as interns, providing news
stories to any organization. That made news when ProPublica, the
nonpartisan investigative website, joined forces with TheNewsOutlet.
Youngstown State journalism students initially will work on
investigative stories guided by ProPublica editors. ProPublica also is
an open source news organization.

• I’m willing to risk my perfect record at predicting Pulitzers: Tracey
Shelton’s stunning photo of four Syrian rebels silhouetted by the flash
of a tank shell that killed three of them in Aleppo. How Shelton
escaped is unclear. She is close enough for the men to be individually
recognizable. Her images are at GlobalPost.com: men sweeping a street,
grabbing their weapons at the sight of an advancing Syrian Army tank,
the explosion, the lone survivor running toward her through the smoke,
and his lucky minor arm wound. My previous prediction: that the Pulitzer
committee would change its rules to allow digital entries and honor the
New Orleans Times-Picayune for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina that inundated its presses.

• Poynter Online reports further proof of the nation’s partisan divide:
“In August, 31 percent of Democrats polled by the Pew Research Center
for People & the Press reported hearing ‘mostly bad news’ about the
economy. In September, only 15 percent characterized economic news as
bad. Sixty percent of Republicans and 36 percent of independents polled
said economic news was mostly bad. The poll’s authors found the gap
striking: Differences in perceptions of economic news emerged after
Barack Obama took office. But they never have been as great as they are
today.”

• I was delighted to read and hear reporters challenge Romney’s
falsification of the events in Cairo before the deadly riot in Benghazi.
Romney berated Cairo embassy staff for its attempt to defuse rising
Egyptian anger over the online short ridiculing and defaming Muhammed.
The embassy issued a statement sympathizing with Muslim anger over the
video. Romney damned the embassy staff and statement, saying it was the
worst kind of appeasement after rioting in Cairo and Benghazi. He had
to know the statement preceded either riot.

• American news media were of two minds when offered a graphic photo
of a shirtless Chris Stevens after the ambassador was killed in Libya.
Some media used it in their primary news reports. Others didn’t use it
on air or in print but offered it online to readers. I would have used
it. He was not bloody or disfigured, he was not being dragged through
the streets or otherwise abused. He was a murder victim, one of four
Americans killed in the consulate that day, and we can handle these
images and the clarity they bring to events. Our news media showed no
such squeamishness when provided photos of bloody Qaddafi.

• Being a Royal Grandmother probably has always been tough, but Queen
Elizabeth is having another annus terriblus: Prince Harry cavorts naked
with tarts in Las Vegas and the seemingly perfect Kate is photographed
topless on a vacation. Maybe the royals’ police protectors need remedial
ed: cell phone cameras are everywhere and nothing goes unnoticed,
especially if a royal prince is displaying his Crown Jewels, and
paparazzi were sured to track William and Kate and to take off her
bikini top on an outside balcony was unwittingly naive. Someone has to
explain the facts of public life to these folks. They can’t depend on
foreign news media being as deferential as those in the British Isles.
Harry’s immodesty was published in Britain largely because it was
universally available and seen online. Kate’s slip got plenty of online
attention, too. British papers, of course, had to write about the future
queen’s nipples without showing them. If there is an invasion of
privacy suit in France where the photos were published, the photos will
have to be introduced as evidence . . . and there we go again.

Anyone who knows me well can tell you that I'm a total Internet junkie. I spend a lot of my free time online, browsing various sites like Youtube, chatting in forums with friends and otherwise killing time. As of late, though, one particular subject seems to have pushed itself into the forefront of internet denizens everywhere. That is, SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, a censorship bill which was proposed by the US House of Representatives on Oct. 26, 2011. It's created quite a buzz online, and with all the people talking about it and what it supposedly proposes, it's hard to get one's facts straight. Friends of mine claim that the government's trying to censor the internet, block access to certain sites - that SOPA will cripple the World Wide Web as we know it.